Annotation as process: A vital information seeking activity in historical geographic research

This paper describes the role annotations played in evolving and growing the value of a research database in the framework of an historical geographer's information seeking process. The database was designed as a “note‐taking” tool for gathering historical evidence from primary source documents. The individual facts collected at first provided little utility to the researcher, indicative of Buckland's (1991) information‐as‐thing. As the process of collecting data began to amass a large body of material the geographer's information needs grew as new connections were made between the accumulating annotations.